LinkedIn lets Page owners view, sort, learn more about their followers

Pages also now have an ‘Events’ tab to feature their (virtual) events.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

from Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing https://ift.tt/2GfPzqQ via اصول سيو

How Your Brand Can Earn Media Coverage on NBC News, USA Today, CNBC, and More

Posted by amandamilligan

As you might imagine, it’s not easy to get your brand name mentioned in top media outlets.

But if you put in the work to engage in content marketing + digital PR, the benefits are massive:

• High-quality backlinks to your site
• A significant boost in brand awareness
• An increase in your brand’s authority
• Improved relationships with writers who loved your content

I’ll explain how you can earn this type of coverage and its corresponding benefits for your brand.

Step 1: Create newsworthy content

You probably have an instinctual sense of what qualifies as news, but some of the key newsworthy elements are timeliness, proximity, and significance.

Timeliness is tough. Hard news is usually covered by media outlets automatically anyway. However, there’s a way to create news — and it’s through data journalism.

By doing your own research, conducting your own studies, running your own surveys, and performing your own analyses, you’re effectively creating news by offering brand new stories.

For example, for our client Porch, we used data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American FactFinder, Yelp, and Zillow to determine which cities are the best for young families.

This project is inherently location-based, which adds the proximity element as well. But even if your content isn’t location-based, explore whether you can take your data and localize it so that you cover multiple geographic areas. (Then, you can pitch local news in addition to national news!)

Significance is also an excellent element to keep in mind, especially during the ideation stage. It basically means: How many people are impacted by this news, and to what degree?

This is especially important if you’re aiming for national news publications, as they tend to have a wide audience. In this case, there are plenty of young families across the country, and CNBC saw that it could connect with this demographic.

When you combine all of these newsworthy elements, you can increase your chances of getting respectable news publications interested.

Step 2: Design and package the content for clarity

You need to present your data in a clear and compelling way. Easier said than done, though, right?

Here are common design pitfalls to watch out for:

• Over-designing. Instead, experiment with simplistic styles that match your branding and take more creative liberties with headers and where the data naturally lends itself to imagery.
• Over-branding. If you have your logo on all of the images, it might be a bit too much branding for some publishers. However, if you have a really authoritative brand, it can add authority to the content, too. Test both versions to see what works best for you.
• Over-labeling. Include all of the text and labels you need to make things clear, but don’t have too much repetition. The more there is to read, the more time it’ll take to understand what’s happening on the graph.

Finally, don’t be afraid to add the most interesting insights or context as callouts to the images. That way people can identify the most pertinent information immediately while still having more to explore if they want the full story.

Take, for example, one of the graphics we created for BestVPN for a project that got coverage on The Motley Fool, USA Today, Nasdaq and more. We don’t assume people will read text in an article to get relevant information, so we put it right on the image.

Here’s another example of a project image we created for Influence.co.

We included the callout at the bottom of the image and featured it in our pitch emails (more on that later) because we knew it was a compelling data point. Lo and behold, it became the headline for the Bustle coverage we secured.

Note: It’s entirely possible a news publication won’t run your images. That’s totally fine! Creating the images is still worth it, because they help everyone grasp your project more quickly (including writers), and when well done, they convey a sense of authority.

When you have all of your data visualized, we recommended creating a write-up that goes along with it. One objective of the article is to explain why you executed the project in the first place. What were you trying to discover? How is this information useful to your audience?

The other objective is to provide more color to the data. What are the implications of your findings? What could it mean to readers, and how can they apply the new knowledge to their lives, if applicable?

Include quotes from experts when appropriate, as this will be useful to publication writers as well.

Step 3: Write personalized pitches

I could create an entirely separate article about how to properly pitch top-tier publishers. But for our purposes, I do want to address two of the most important elements:

Treat writers like people

“You did something PR people never do — but should. Looked at my Twitter feed and made it personal. Nicely done!” — CNBC writer

Building real connections with people takes time and effort. If you’re going to pitch a writer, you need to do the following:

• Read their past work and fully understand their beat
• Understand how your work matches their beat
• Check out their social profiles to learn more about them as people

Some still swear by the templated approach. While it might work sometimes, we’ve found that because writers’ inboxes continue to be inundated with pitches, reaching out to them in a more personalized manner can not only increase our chances of getting emails opened, but also getting a genuinely appreciative response.

So, start your email with a personal connection. Reach out about something you have in common or something about them you admire. It will go a long way!

Include a list of the most relevant insights

“Wow these findings are super interesting and surprising. I will for sure include if I go ahead with this piece.” — The Wall Street Journal writer

Never assume a writer is going to click through to your project and read the entire thing before deciding if they want to cover it. In the pitch email, you need to spell out exactly what you think is the most interesting part about the project for their readers.

The key word being their readers. Sure, overall you probably have a few main takeaways in mind that are compelling, but there’s often nuance in which specific takeaways will be the most relevant to particular publishers.

We’ve seen this so many times, and it’s reflected in the resulting headlines. For example, for a project we created called Generational Knowledge Gaps, we surveyed nearly 1,000 people about their proficiency in hands-on tasks. Look at the news headlines on REALTOR Magazine and ZDNet, respectively:

While REALTOR Magazine went with a headline that captures the general spirit of the project, ZDNet’s is more honed in on what matters for their readers: the tech side of things. If we’d pitched to them the same way we’d pitched to REALTOR, they might not have covered the project at all.

So, after a personalization, include bullet points that say what the key data points are for their particular audience, wrap up the email with a question of whether they’re interested, and send it off.

Conclusion

It’s not an easy process to get the attention of top writers. You have to take time to develop high-quality content — it takes us at least a month — and then strategically promote it, which can also take at least another month to get as much coverage as you can. However, this investment can have major payoff, as you’ll be earning unparalleled brand awareness and high-value backlinks.

---

To help us serve you better, please consider taking the 2020 Moz Blog Reader Survey, which asks about who you are, what challenges you face, and what you'd like to see more of on the Moz Blog.

Take the Survey

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/32MJvhl via osoul seo Blog

Apple Ratings are coming to iOS 14, how disruptive will it be?

The company may use device location to ensure review integrity.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

from Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing https://ift.tt/2QKxROs via اصول سيو

Google Merchant Promotions will be approved faster this holiday, Google says

Google also announced pre-holiday updates for Local campaigns.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

from Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing https://ift.tt/31MAnd0 via اصول سيو

Voice SEO: Different tactics required for Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa

Study by SEMrush found only 1% overlap in answers to the same voice queries across platforms.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

from Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing https://ift.tt/2YQf8oU via اصول سيو

Advertisers to absorb Google’s digital services taxes in UK, Austria, Turkey

What to consider before Google starts passing the taxes onto advertisers in November.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

from Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing https://ift.tt/2QGsjo5 via اصول سيو

Page Authority 2.0 Is Coming This Month: What’s Changing and Why

Posted by rjonesx.

Hey folks,

I'm Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist with Moz, and I'm proud to announce that this month we’ll be releasing a terrific update to our metric, Page Authority (PA).

Although Page Authority hasn't attracted the same attention as its sibling metric Domain Authority, PA has always correlated with SERPs much better than DA, serving as a strong predictor of ranking. While PA has always fluctuated with changes in the link graph, we’re introducing a whole new method of deriving the score.

Learn More About Page Authority 2.0

What's changing

Long gone are the days of just counting backlinks a couple of ways and hoping they correlate well with SERPs. As Moz tends to do, we’re pioneering a new manner of calculating Page Authority to produce superior results. Here are some of the ways we’re changing things up:

The training set

In the past, we used SERPs alone to train the Page Authority model. While this method was simple and direct, it left much to be desired. Our first step in addressing the new Page Authority is redefining the training set altogether.

Instead of modeling Page Authority based on one page's ability to outrank another page, we now train based on the cumulative value of a page based on a number of metrics including search traffic and CPC. While this is a bit of an oversimplification of what’s going on, this methodology allows us to better compare pages that don't appear in the SERPs together.

For example, imagine Page A is on one topic and Page B is on another topic. Historically, our model wouldn't get to compare these two pages because they never appear on the same SERP. This new methodology provides an abstract value to each page, such that they can be compared with any other page by the machine-learned model.

The re-training set

One of the biggest problems in building metrics is not what the models see, but what the models don't see.

Think about this for a minute: what types of URLs don't show up in the SERPs that the model will use to produce Page Authority? Well, for starters, there won't be many images or other binary files. There also won't be penalized pages. In order to address this problem, we now use a common solution of running the model, identifying outliers (high PA URLs which do not in fact have any search value), and then feeding those URLs back into the training set. We can then re-run the model such that it learns from its own mistakes. This can be repeated as many times as is necessary to reduce the number of outliers.

Ripping off the Band-Aid

Moz is always cognizant of the impact the changes to our metrics might have on our customers. There is a trade-off between continuity and accuracy. With Page Authority, we’re focusing on accuracy. This may cause larger-than-normal shifts in your Page Authority, so it’s more important than ever to think about Page Authority with respect to your competitors, not as a standalone number.

What actions should we take?

Communicate with stakeholders, team members, and clients about the update

Just like our upgrade to Domain Authority, some users will likely be surprised by changes in their PA. Make sure they understand that the new PA will be more accurate (and more useful!) and that the most important measurement is relative to their competitors. We won't release a Page Authority which isn't better than the previous version, so even if the results are disappointing, understand that you now have better insight than ever before into the performance of your pages in the SERPs.

Use PA as a relative metric, like DA

Page Authority is intrinsically comparative. A PA of 70 means nothing unless you know the PA of your competitors. It could be high enough to allow you to rank for every keyword you like, or it could be terribly low because your competitors are Wikipedia and Quora. The first thing you should do when analyzing the Page Authority of any URL is set it in the proper context of its competitor's URLs.

Expect PA to keep pace with Google

Just as we announced with Domain Authority, we’re not going to launch the new PA and just let it go. Our intent is to continue to improve upon the model as we discover new and better features and models. This volatility will mostly affect pages with unnatural link profiles, but we would rather stay up-to-date with Google's algorithms even if it means a bit of a bumpy ride.

When is it launching?

We’ll be rolling out the new Page Authority on September 30, 2020. Between now and then, we encourage you to explore our resources to help you prepare and facilitate conversations with clients and team members. Following the launch of the new PA, I’ll also be hosting a webinar on October 15 to discuss how to leverage the metric. We’re so excited about the new and improved PA and hope you’re looking forward to this update too.

If you have any questions, please comment below, reach out to me on Twitter @rjonesx, or email me at russ@moz.com.

To get prepared and learn more about the upcoming change to Page Authority, be sure to dig into our helpful resources:

Visit the PA Resource Center

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/3jKEkp5 via osoul seo Blog